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Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

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101–110 of 174 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#101
A resounding "nope" for me. Not because my native language lacks the vocabulary, but rather because I only learned CS in English and because Hong Kong.

My mother tongue is Cantonese, but I was schooled for the better part of my life in Montreal, Canada. So when it comes to anything academic, I can only communicate in English or French. I learned Software Engineering at Concordia University, which is English-speaking.

I now live and work in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong being Hong Kong, we still mostly use English verbs and nouns for anything IT, even though the rest of the sentence could be in Cantonese. e.g. we would say "我將啲change commit咗啦,push埋上GitHub個repo度啦。"

The above sentence would mean "I've already committed the changes, and even pushed them to the repo on GitHub."

In my mother tongue, of course we have all the properly translated words for the above:

- change: 修改 or 改動

- commit: 提交

- push: 推

- (versioning) repo: 版本庫

We even have nouns for queues (隊列), linked lists (連接表), stacks (盞), etc.

We just never use them except outside of academic literature in Chinese.

About the only exception is the word for a generic "computer", which is "電腦" (literally "electric brain") in full or just "腦" (“brain") in short. E.g. ”你部腦呢?" ("Where is your comp?")

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#102
Persian native here. Every now and then I tell myself it's time to start translating some of the books that interest me and that haven't been translated already, but then I find myself reading some related books (translated to Persian/Farsi) and after seeing some of the ridiculous terms used for the translations, I just give-up and postpone the entire idea for some uncertain future.

I personally have to guess some of the meanings and for some other words/terms I need a Persian/English dictionary (not even sure if it exists or that I can find anything up-to-date) to figure out what the translator meant.

We have an "Academy of Persian Language and Literature" which comes up with "Persian" terms/words for most things but a lot of them will almost hardly ever be used even on public television which is (almost) entirely operated by the government itself.

I remember 11 years ago when I attempted to register a company there which the name had to be made-up of a minimum of 3 words and that I had chosen "digital" as one. They rejected the my request and asked me to use the equivalent term which wasn't even Persian and came from Arabic and that no-one even uses today. At the same time I remember there was a national competition about "digital" media with ads running on every tv channel using the exact word "digital" in them... Sent an email to the president of that academy which comes up with these translations and rules (also chairman of the parliament at that time) expressing my feeling, obviously never got a response nor anything changed. I never registered their proposed version as it would've just been a laughing stock had I gone with it.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#103
post #65

I am a native Sinhalese, and I can speak Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Tamil. No, we cannot use native languages for CS. For Sinhalese, there is an on-going attempt to invent words or rather put words together to translate a technical term to Sinhalese, but nobody can figure it out. "Download", for example, is literally translated to a word that doubles as taking something down via a crane, and it has become a so…

>> "Download", for example, is literally translated to a word that doubles as taking something down via a crane

As an only English speaker, I dont see any problem with that or understand why it would be funny. To transfer a pile of material down to the ground via crane seems like a good metaphor for transferring a pile of data down from the cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#104
post #84

Coming from Latin America I would have never imagined before this thread that so many large countries would not teach CS in their own languages, and would have to speak in English amongst themselves! It's fascinating, over here we incorporate thousands of English words into the Spanish IT lingo, but while they can could roughly communicate in English, most people I know wouldn't be able to have a discussion entirely…

So why would it feel awkward/academic to use translated versions for I'm guessing common words in spanish such as pull?

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#105
I'm Russian and Georgian native speaker.

Short answer to your question is "NO", but I would not bother writing it, if not the long answer I really want to share.

While languages I speak are not similar at all, I see the same behavior among my colleagues, whatever their native language is. They use IT specific English words mixed into their native language.

What is even more interesting, is that these English words do not replace native words, but become domain specific language.

So, for instance, for Georgian.

Task is "ამოცანა" (amotsana)

Done is "დამთავრებული" (damt'avrebuli)

So one and the same person will tell you ამოცანა დავამთავრე (amostana davamt'avre) when speaking about some task in general, but when it's about task in Jira, it becomes "ტასკი დავდანე" ([task]i dav[done]e)

For Russian it's almost the same.

Fixing is "исправлять" (ispravliat) or "чинить" (chinit)

Bug is "ошибка" (oshibka)

But nobody is "исправляет ошибки" (ispravliaet oshibki) when it's about IT. Living person would say "фиксить баги" ([fix]it [bug]i). But nobody would say "фиксить" (fixit) about a car.

You may notice that English words grow suffixes and prefixed to adopt to grammar of another language. It's not the language you may find in books, but it is how people around me communicate.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#106
Swede here. Never felt hindered by Swedish but with very few exceptions domain-specific terms will be English words (resulting in beautiful Swenglish/svengelska).

“Najs refactor, men kan du rebasa dina commits innan vi mergar till masterbranchen?”

(Written documentation, commit messages etc will always be in English though)

I saw your post on the same topic on Kodapor and I think it’s just a matter of you having had way more exposure in CS through English and therefore being more fluent in English in those contexts. There’s nothing in the Swedish language that would make it less powerful than English, as long as you’re willing to borrow vocabulary. The medical field has been doing this with latin for ages - loads of Latin words but nobody’s actually speaking Latin.

There are a few words that still feel natural to translate: Kompilator (compiler), kluster (cluster), minne (memory), binär (binary), etc. But for the most part it just feels forced and confusing to resist mixing in foreign words.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#107

For my PhD thesis, I was required to write an abstract in my native language, German, and had a pretty hard time of it. On the other hand, I've experimented a bit with high school level CS teaching, and found that with sufficient preparation, it's fairly doable. I suspect that when we struggle to express a concept in our native language, we may have somewhat deceived ourselves in how clearly we expressed the concept…

That's quite surprising to me! Because it used to be the case that some reading ability in German was required for the serious engineer or scientist.

From memory from around 1850 up to 1920s.

(I'm not that old heh, but I know people who have done serious historical research in engineering that required German)

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> StackOverflow is in English cough cough - https://pt.stackoverflow.com/ - https://ru.stackoverflow.com/ - https://es.stackoverflow.com/ - https://jp.stackoverflow.com/ More seriously though, it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue: more content being available in English which leads to more people having to learn English and might end up producing English content. But this in no point is an exclusive thing. There is…

> cough cough I know of the localized versions of StackOverflow but they hardly are worth visiting. > it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue: more content being available in English which leads to more people having to learn English and might end up producing English content. It's not an issue, it's awesome. > But this in no point is an exclusive thing. There is nothing that says that if you participate in HN in Engl…

> I know of the localized versions of StackOverflow but they hardly are worth visiting.

Portuguese is my native english but I never use the portuguese version of StackOverflow. The english version content is just so much better that I don't bother looking at the portuguese one.

Wikipedia is an interesting case as well, since it's also available in several languages. I tend to favour the english version when looking for content that is somewhat culturally neutral.

> It's not an issue, it's awesome.

If you're a native english speaker it's really awesome. If you aren't and don't speak the language it's yet another barrier for learning. Even greater if developers that speak your language decide to dismiss it and adopt english at all times. I believe that's the point "rglullis" was trying to make.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#109
post #42
post #38

I think I can only echo most of the comments here that of course there are translations of "branch" "implementation" etc., but the norm is to adapt the English one to the language in my experience. Good example is Turkish, there have been a lot of effort into deriving enough words to be able to converse in full Turkish about the CS topics or even Scientific topics, but it was not able to "satisfy the demand". As an e…

While "branch" is loaned in Korea, "implementation" is never loaned, the translation 구현 completely satisfied that demand. In my experience, there are better and worse translations of terms, and adoption mostly depends on quality of translation. Edit: Additional explanation. 구현 roughly means "realization", which I think is a better term than even "implementation" itself. Word "implementation" in non-programming contex…

It's old-fashioned, but branch does have a Korean equivalent: 분기 (literally "branching", or a single branch separating into multiple branches). E.g., 무조건 분기 (unconditional branch), 조건 분기 (conditional branch), 분기문 (branch statement).

(I suspect it was imported from Japanese 分岐.)

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#110
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see there was no shortage of creative self-proclaimed linguists in these parts of the lands behind the iron curtain as well. Our expression for "mouse" was quite byzantine: "manipulator stołowo-kulotoczny" (table sphererolling manipulator?). This just begs for a TLA like "MSK".

Korean translation of "mouse" was "squirrel", although ultimately it lost to a loan. I can't imagine why anyone thought that long-winded translation in Polish would stick. Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty. I think that kind of consideration of association is important in translation.

> Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty.

That's a great example of the difference between translation and localization.

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